


the sound in my heart

by excusemeliam



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-21
Updated: 2014-04-21
Packaged: 2018-01-20 06:28:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1500149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/excusemeliam/pseuds/excusemeliam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clarke's having the same dream over and over again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the sound in my heart

**Author's Note:**

> This is technically a sequel to 'i've been waiting to hear you breathe' but it's more focused on Clarke as a character and it's also kind of very depressing for at least the first 60% because last week's episode fucked up my shit in a major way.
> 
> Title from Charli XCX's 'Boom Clap'.
> 
> Please talk to me about this show/them/Clarke Griffin as a heroine for the ages.

Clarke is sitting on the bottom of the ocean. It's colder than she remembered but it's the same silence she always recognises. Everything around her is just floating. She remembers what will happen next and begins to panic when suddenly there's a weight on her chest.  
'Clarke! Clarke!' She opens her mouth to speak and she almost feels the water pour into her lungs.  
She blinks her eyes; it's pitch dark and she's no longer surrounded by the cool water. She's where she fell asleep at her watch post near the wall. She sees Octavia looming over her face, shaking her shoulders. 'Clarke!'  
'What is it?' she asks. Please let her not have woken them up.  
'He's sick. He needs help, he needs you,' Octavia says frantically.  
There must persist still some of the dream logic because Clarke knows perfectly who Octavia means.

It takes a few minutes for her to collect her supplies with Octavia talking the whole time about how he’s been throwing up since dinner and she wasn’t sure what to do but it's not too long before she's in Bellamy's (or, she supposes now, their) tent where seemingly the whole camp are standing worriedly.  
Octavia shooes them inside and in the light of the tent Clarke notices her face is covered in tears. Clarke feels a momentary pang of loneliness that she has no-one at the camp she loves the way the Blake siblings love each other. The closest she'd had was Wells and all she had left of him now was a grave and an overwhelming feeling of guilt.  
Octavia, with her vice-like grip on Clarke's forearm, drags her through the crowd towards the bed containing her brother.  
Clarke swallows quickly and it catches on her throat like a sickness. Bellamy looks awfully small in that bed, small and almost translucent with sweat; his breathing sounded like his lungs are being powered by an ancient system of pulleys and levers, ready to drop at any point.

Octavia’s fussing around the body (and Clarke wonders when it became the body to her; when it ceased to have an owner; she felt her mind already burying Bellamy, another person she would lose down here; a graveyard stretching out for miles like a landing strip ready for the Ark), placing pillows behind Bellamy's head and cold cloths on his forehead.  
Clarke snaps into action, pulling a chair up next to the bed and grabbing Bellamy's hand. He couldn't leave her.  
'Bellamy, squeeze my hand,' she says, in a voice that she meant to sound reassuring but just comes out desperate and heavy. She watches for something to happen but his eyelashes just flutter a little and his hand doesn't even twitch.  
Clarke leans over him, placing his ear on his chest right over his heart. It reminds her of being back on the Ark. When she was ten years old, Wells got a pet kitten and one day Clarke got to hold it and she felt its heart beating in her hands almost dangerously, as if it could slip out at any moment. Bellamy’s heart wasn’t like that, it was beating slowly: reassuringly there but weak. But that same strange sense of intrusion crept into Clarke’s mind; that Bellamy was a thing, with organs, and she could feel them.

'He's been poisoned,' Clarke says as soon as the cogs in her mind finished whirring, connecting the nausea with the weakness and the heartbeat. Octavia howls next to her and Clarke wishes, not for the first time, that there were adults here who could take things over at this point and Clarke could just go back to bed and lie there until she stopped feeling like she was going to be crushed by everything she felt. But she recovers herself for Octavia's sake.  
'Don't worry, it's not enough to kill him. His heart's still beating and he's still breathing and he'd be dead if he was going to die.'  
'What are you going to do?' Octavia asks, her eyes huge with tears.  
'There's nothing I can do, but it'll pass. His body's trying to get rid of it. He's going to be fine.' Fine is a relative term but Clarke remembers from her mother’s lectures about bedside manner that it was important to tell people that their loved ones were going to be fine. ‘They’re either dead or fine, Clarke,’ her mother used to tell her.  
Octavia exhales and Clarke lets her head drop down half in relief and half in exhaustion.

Everyone else goes to bed and even Octavia is persuaded to sit in a chair next to Bellamy's bed with a blanket where she promptly passes out but Clarke sits there for an hour with her hand on Bellamy's heart, just making sure it's still beating before she too finally succumbs to sleep, this time without dreaming.

Clarke wakes up to Bellamy's hand on hers on his heart. He's sitting up and smiling. Clarke lifts her hand off his chest and it’s almost like she can still feel his heartbeat in her fingertips.  
'Princess,' he says. His voice is cracked but he sounds human again.  
'Hey,' she says softly.  
'I hear you saved me,' he says.  
'Yeah, I guess,' she says. 'How long have I been asleep?'  
'Eleven hours,' Bellamy says. He seems pleased by that. 'Sorry my sister woke you up in the middle of the night.'  
'It's okay, I knew how that dream ended anyway.' Clarke's fingernails dig into her palm almost as a defence mechanism. Wells taught her that one – if you hurt your hand, you can’t feel your bruised knee, or scraped shin. Clarke isn’t sure what she’s trying not to feel now, but she can feel the floodgates weakening.  
'Tell me about it,' he says, and he pats the bed next to him.  
Normally, Clarke would make excuses about the work she has to do but she just picks herself up and lies next to him with her face faced towards his and she decides to tell someone.

'I have this dream. I've been getting it ever since you told me about what you did with Chancellor Jaha.’ Bellamy raises an eyebrow in what looks like concern but nods as if to say, ‘go on’.  
‘I'm sitting on the bottom of the ocean and it's cool and quiet and I can see for miles in the water. But then there's this shadow that falls on me and I look up and there's something there. So I swim up to the top, I do this every time even though I know what's going to happen, I swim to the surface and there's the Ark. It's here, it's landed, and I see my mother again and she holds me and everything's fine.' Clarke’s voice catches and Bellamy reaches for her hand and holds it between them, balanced between their bodies almost like a pendulum.  
'But then, I hear this bang, and I turn and they've shot you and they shoot Octavia and Raven and Finn and Jasper and Monty.’ Clarke closes her eyes and just keeps talking. She can feel Bellamy still looking at her through her eyelashes.  
‘They shoot all of them in front of me and I can't do anything, it's like I can't move. And then, just as I realise it's a dream and that it's not real, they turn to me, and then they kill me too. Bellamy, I don't know if I want them to come down here, not if it means we'll be in danger. Too many people down here have died already, I can't lose anyone else.'  
'No-one else is going to die, Clarke,' he says and it's sincere and it's also the same as her mother telling the wives of dying men that they're going to be okay. It's just mercy.  
‘I’m just so scared all the time,’ she says. ‘I know I have to be brave but it’s just so hard.’  
‘I know,’ Bellamy says softly. ‘But I’m here if you need to talk about it. We’re going to do this together, you and me.’

‘You know, I used to think you were made of stone,’ Clarke says, dusting her fingers along his knuckles and relishing how tough his hands are. They’re kind of like polar opposites: she’s all soft voices and kind words but there’s steel beneath her skin that holds her in place when she’s in danger of shattering and she’s seen Bellamy build walls with his bare hands but he’s fragile when he’s open like this.  
‘And I used to think that you were some rich girl who’d treat all us regular people like your property,’ Bellamy replies, drawing his thumb across Clarke’s palm in a way that almost sends a shiver down her spine.  
‘Oh, you’re not my property?’ Clarke says, leaning into Bellamy’s face and kissing him gently on the mouth. She can see Bellamy rolling his eyes but his grip on her hand just tightens.  
‘You think you’re so cute,’ he whispers against her temple, placing a tiny kiss just by her eyebrow.  
‘Is that why you like me? Because I’m cute?’ Bellamy is silent and Clarke raises an eyebrow and smirks. She’s not sure what she’s testing here: Bellamy or her, but he steadies and moves back from her face to look right at her and his eyes seem to say what he won’t yet. He kisses her, and her other hand moves to the back of his head where her fingers stroke his hair. It’s softer than she imagined but then again, Clarke hasn’t had much experience touching boys’ hair. He hasn’t let go of the hand between them yet. For all the stories around camp of Bellamy’s sexual prowess, the thing he seems most insistent on with Clarke is holding her hand.

Clarke’s breathing is getting ragged and her neck is starting to overheat when Bellamy’s mouth suddenly detaches from hers. He starts kissing her ear and the heat from his breath almost threatens to shut down all air supply to her head when he whispers, ‘why do you like me, princess?’ low and slow into the hollow of her neck.  
‘Because you’re cute,’ she says, stroking his chest with the hand he’s holding between them. Bellamy moves back from her and his hand tightens slightly, his fingers wrapped around her wrist.  
‘Seriously, princess. I figured someone like you wouldn’t go for someone like me.’ Clarke could be offended but she knows what he means. He thinks she’s too good for him.  
‘I like you,’ she says and that’s almost it. She likes him because it’s him. But that isn’t enough, she knows. ‘Because you’re good, Bellamy. I need you. I can’t do this without you, I wouldn’t know how. I like being with you.’  
Bellamy looks at her cautiously as if he's making sure this isn't a joke.  
‘I like being with you too,’ he says after a while.

And so they spend the rest of the day like that, wrapped up in each other, and for a while the world still turns without them carrying it. And that night, when Clarke sleeps alongside Bellamy, she dreams not of bottomless oceans and bloodstained beaches, but of fields of gold and her life after the end of the world.


End file.
